A Blog about the joys and frustrations of growing food, herbs and flowers on a rocky hill near Nakusp, B.C.

A mixed bed in all it's late summer glory

Friday, August 14, 2015

Dandelions, a love affair

This too was sitting in draft, started some time in May. Oh well.Some plant lovers believe it is possible to call plants onto your land. Not by direct means like seeding or transplanting, but by sending a mental invitation to....what? Plant spirit? Why not. I rather like the idea, which is definitely out of the realm of 'evidence based'.

There was a time when no dandelions graced this land. Some time in the mid eighties I wrote a little piece for the local newspaper extolling their virtues. The next year the first yellow visitors appeared. This may of course be pure coincidence. We also started seeing Arion Ater, the large black slugs, which were definitely not invited. Nevertheless, I have enjoyed toying with the notion that Dandelion is a personal friend. When I received my first Reiki activation (I prefer that word to initiation) the teacher told me to visualise a lotus in my crown chakra. Now I have never liked lotus worship. All that talk about purity in spite of it growing in the mud. Such patriarchal snobbery. Where would that pure white flower be without the life giving mud, huh? How about honouring the mud instead? This insight owed to Starhawk's "Dreaming the Dark."I saw a dandelion instead.

8 comments:

Dandelions--you either love em---or hate em!I adore those sunshiney flowers in spring--there isn't much in these parts for the bees that time of year.Hubby despises them---I think the "puff" stage is the problem for him.Enjoy!

Hi, Ien! I am so tardy nowadays...but I am guessing at "pippeling: Pipsqueak? I recall one of our Dutch neighbors, Helen Werver, telling her husband Henk, that I was a pipsqueak - he delighted in translating it for me right on the spot, much to her chagrin. I thought it was a compliment!

As for your experiments with rebar - were you using 1/2 inch diameter bar? It is labeled in Imperial sizes over here, in 1/8th inch increments, so a #3 is 3/8", #4 is 1/2", #5 is 5/8ths...all the way up to about 2 and a quarter inch diameter, according to a chart I saw. I like it for an anchor for schedule 40 PVC, too. You need a helper to pin it against a board with a nail to hold it, another nail at the apex of the curve you want to make ( a garden hose makes a decent shape on a big sheet of plywood (or use a piece of string tied to a nail at the centerpoint of the arc you want, with a marker or pencil tied to the other end to swing it across the board, and pound several more nails to guide the heated-up PVC)...... yeah, right, not fun to wrestle hot PVC! I saw one contraption that piped hot water vapor from a steam kettle into the PVC, which then bent rather nicely onto the nails along the curve, but I bet it wasn't as much fun as it looked.

I need to put up another post to show what mischief I've been doing, but this old house keeps giving me new surprises to fix instead. I steal the sandy loam piles the moles make to fill in the low places. The garden snakes aren't nabbing those moles, I guess, but I'm trying to chase them out of the way before I mow. Without rain, I don't even need to mow!

About Me

Originally from Amsterdam, Netherlands, came to Canada with geologist husband and ended up living the simple life in a rural paradise. My passions are reading, gardening, natural healing, and doing my small bit to work towards a greener, more just society.